My BFF Jay and I have this running joke about our juvenilia. It's really over the top. So since today is the last day of class, and my tradition is to have everyone read something, I have decided to share some of my juvenilia with the intro to poetry writing crew.
I'm sure they will be shocked that I consider something I wrote at 24 to be juvenilia, because golly, I can't be a year over 25, right? Seriously though, I wanted to read something old. It's fun going through past files and finding stuff that could actually hang with my poems today.
Would anyone else care to join the "post some of your juvenilia Thursday" festivities?
This is a silly, odd little poem that I'm not reading, but that I thought would be nice to post on the blog. To all my fellow profs, bon courage during this hideous time of the semester.
CLAIR DE LUNE
(by a much younger Mary Biddinger)
Night clouds
slacked in. Behind
the restaurant
two cooks in a knife
fight, and us lurching.
You sanded
my hands numb
on a coal box, said
you would eat all
ten of my fingers
if they were tempura.
Inside, fish strung
by the gills, guts
on the burners.
What a taste
in the smog rain,
never better.
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Here you go! Free of charge! 19-year-old Jeannine's poetry. Note the use of rhyme scheme, the word "jewelshine" (Neat! LOL) and parentheses, which I still (over)use.
Argument and Reconciliation
Look at me, you insist, but your eyes sane
Cool in their jewelshine can't catch mine
slick and silver as dimes made of rain.
(But in a close damp night they are gray doves,
and your breath is a seasalt snare.
Your hands are like august storms
rough and tender in my hair.)
(Woohoo!)
Thanks so much for posting, Jeannine!
I don't have juvinilia. What I have is poetry I wrote last thrursday which is just as awful as what I was writing 20 years ago.
Last night it rained while I slept
and kept on raining until it seemed
half the mountain might sluff away,
exposing the red-brown muscle of earth
if you would just give it a yank.
Asleep, I did not know until I woke to find
shimmering pavement, sponge like grass,
and the smell of cedar wood.
Behind Three Sisters Mountain
the sun counters against last nights’ storm clouds,
will rise, dry and bake the ground like a scab,
eventually turning to dust,
blowing away with the four winds.
A moment or two is all I have left
to look, listen, feel, before I need to go on
with the rest of my day.
Absorbing it all like the soil,
I drink from the morning until I can
no longer swallow with my senses,
letting the excess runoff to wash over me
down river to other fertile pastures.
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